Special Online Edition
The painting on this issue's cover, entitled Old Damascus, is by Syrian artist Emad Hemede, known as Jano. His focus on religious monuments and Syrian architecture dates back to 2007. "I felt we were living in a precarious equilibrium: being all from different religions, peacefully living together," Jano told us. "I wanted to convey a message that we must take care of this precious coexistence." Jano left Syria in 2011 to share his art with people around the world, and has not been able to return to his country since. "My future work will describe my dream of the Syrian future, which is nothing but its beautiful past," he wrote in an e-mail.
Staff
“Manufacturing Criminals”
In the wake of the police killing of Freddie Gray, numerous commentators labeled participants in the 2015 Baltimore uprising as…
Which History in Obergefell v. Hodges?
History really matters in Obergefell v. Hodges [et al.], the US Supreme Court case that has brought equal marriage rights…
Freedom of Religion in the Contemporary Middle East: Unsatisfactory Answers to the Wrong Questions
The persecution of non-Muslim and Shi’i Muslim inhabitants of Iraq and Syria at the hands of ISIS has dominated both…
Freedom in the Iranian Clerical Debate
During the first week of July 1999, thousands of university students demonstrated in the streets of Tehran against a new…
Making Space for Shi’ism in Afghanistan’s Public Sphere and State Structure
In Kabul, Afghanistan, a city that is over 1,500 years old, arguably the most famous landmark is the grave of…
Sectarianism and the Legacy of Empire in Egypt
Last February, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. Wide international condemnation of the…
All Eyes on the State: The Limits of Religious Freedom in Modern Egypt
In the midst of the political turmoil that has engulfed Egypt over the past four years, one question that has…
A 17th-Century Indian Parrot: Interpreting the Art of the Deccan
Scholars are beginning to pay attention to an understudied region of India, the Deccan, and its rich cosmopolitan culture. In…
Summer Reading: New Historical Novels
From 16th-century Morocco to 1970s Congo, from 1800s Virginia to 1940s Palestine, these seven novels published in the last twelve…
On “Standing with Historians of Japan”
To the Editor: I noted with much sadness the letter signed by 19 American historians of Japan published in the…
On The History Manifesto
To the Editor: Issues of accuracy and propriety in Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s The History Manifesto were addressed in…
Ecological Explorations on Staten Island: Cycling through the Greenbelt
Last week, I stepped away from my computer and into the Staten Island Greenbelt, wondering what it means to bicycle…
Public History Employer Survey
Although job prospects for public historians have improved with the passing of the Great Recession, questions about the overall health…
David Kyvig
The National History Center has just lost a dear friend and supporter. David Kyvig passed away on Monday, the victim…
Letter of Concern Regarding the Possible Closure of the Illinois State Museum
James Grossman, executive director of the , has written to Governor Rauner and legislative leaders expressing concern about a proposal…
What I Do: Jessie Kratz, Historian for the National Archives
As part of the Career Diversity for Historians initiative, the AHA is producing and making available short videos of historians…
AHA Member Spotlight: MayaLisa Holzman
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
At the First ScholarFest, Conversations and Connections
This past Thursday, staff from the AHA and the National History Center headed to the Kluge Center at the Library…
Recapping the NHC’s Second Annual Reception for Congressional Interns
Following the National History Center’s second annual reception for congressional interns, NHC and AHA intern reflects on an evening of…
Distance, Empathy, and the Challenge of Interpreting an Intimate Past
In 1994, the state of California put on display the uglier side of democracy: nearly 60 percent of the electorate…
AHA Opposes Georgia Policy to Deny Higher Ed Access to Undocumented Students
The believes that higher education should be available to all students. AHA president Vicki Ruiz has sent a letter to the…
Past Graduates with a BA in History: Where are They Now?
To help history students adapt to the changing job market, the AHA has begun a new series on searching for…
To Mayor Riley of Charleston: Everything Has a History
Today’s New York Times reports that Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, South Carolina, has declared that our task…
AHA Member Spotlight: John Ghazvinian
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
AHA Sends Letter of Concern Regarding Funding Cuts for the State Historical Society of Iowa
On June 16, AHA President Vicki L. Ruiz and Executive Director James Grossman sent a letter protesting proposed cuts to…
Sites of Resistance: Mapping LGBTQ History with New York City Preservationists
From smoky speakeasies featuring female impersonators to unassuming houses that hosted secret political meetings, the built environment of New York…
Summer School
For some 15 years, now, I have been fortunate to work for the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, a…
Being There
Several weeks ago, historian Kate Brown spoke for the Washington History Seminar, hosted by the National History Center and the…
Actions by the AHA Council January–June 2015
Through e-mail conversation, from January 16 to June 5, 2015, the Council of the made the following decisions: Endorsed a…
AHA and Other Scholarly Associations Defend Tenure and Academic Freedom in Wisconsin
The has joined with 21 other scholarly societies in a statement protesting proposed changes to the structure of the University…
Career Diversity Funds Individual Projects at Columbia University
History in Action, one of the pilot programs under the AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians initiative, is primarily organized and…
Field Notes from Angola: Familiar Foreign Country – a Historian’s Research Travels
Historians are travelers—travelers of the heart, the mind, and of the body. In 1953, L.P. Heartly acknowledged, “The past is…
AHA Member Spotlight: Julian Lim
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
Ecological Explorations on Staten Island: Contemporary Landscapes and Archival Paper Trails
I came to Staten Island by way of a volcano. In 2009, I traveled to Mount St. Helens National Volcanic…
Journey into an Undocumented Past: Why I Became a Historian
I became interested in history when I was deployed in the Middle East in 2008. I was troubled by boredom…
AHA Today Introduces the Winners of Its First Blog Contest
The AHA is pleased to announce the winners of its first AHA Today Blog Contest. Over the course of the…
To the Fifth Floor and Beyond
In early May, the University of Chicago’s professionalization seminar continued to help graduate students hone their communication skills with a…
Snapshots of Life in 20th-Century America on Exhibit at the Phillips Collection
Just a block and a half from the Dupont Circle Metro station in Washington, DC, the Phillips Collection is a…
Honing Our Craft
Upon encountering confusion in the classroom regarding the issues of bias versus point of view, high school and college educator…
Report from the Field
The National Institutes of Health is currently undertaking a formal review of the National Library of Medicine. In response, the…
Career Planning as an Undergraduate in History
To help students adapt to the changing job market, the AHA has begun a new series on searching for jobs…
AHA Member Spotlight: Nichole Sanders
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
Historians.org down for Maintenance Today at 4:00 p.m.
Historians.org needs a quick reboot to resolve a technical hiccup and will be unavailable starting at 4:00 p.m. today. We apologize for the…
A Taste of Food History in Action
As graduate student coordinator of Columbia’s History in Action (HIA) program, I recently sat down with Mookie Kideckel, Alma Igra, and…
Uncovering the Past at Mount Vernon’s Slave Cemetery
At the commencement of the Mount Vernon archaeology department’s multi-year Slave Cemetery Survey project, Reverend Darrell Keith White urged visitors…
All History Is Local: Debating the Fate of a Confederate Soldier Statue in Maryland
My barber and I occasionally talk about Rockville past as he gives me my biweekly trim. It’s usually in the…
AHA Member Spotlight: Marc D. Landry II
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
What I Do: Laura Kamoie, Novelist
As part of the Career Diversity for Historians initiative, the AHA is producing and making available short videos of historians…
Radical Politics and Everyday Struggles: Using Archives and Oral History to Explain the Past
Part of what makes doing history so exciting is that the questions and interpretive challenges never really end. In the…
Beyond Binaries: How Transgender History Advances Discourse on Identity
This blog post is one of a three-part series on issues of gender and race identity. In this post, Allison Miller discusses…
Five Things to Know about the History of Prisons before President Obama Visits El Reno
As the president prepares for his historic visit to a federal prison later today, we would like to direct him…
AHA Member Spotlight: Henry Maar
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
Support History, Urge Your Representative to Join the Congressional History Caucus Today
The National Coalition of History (NCH), to which the belongs, has been working with members of Congress over the past…
Binders Full of Books
Summer has arrived! The school year has ended. The weather is warmer. The days are longer. And for many graduate…
The Problem Is Ethnicity, Not Race
This blog post is one of a three-part series on issues of gender and race identity. In this post, weighs in on…
Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal
This blog post is one of a three-part series on issues of gender and race identity. In the coming two…
Invitation to 2015 AASLH Annual Meeting: The Power of Possibility
The American Association for State and Local History invites you to participate in the 2015 AASLH Annual Meeting: The Power of Possibility. The meeting…
Between Suicide Bombings and Religious Freedom in Islamic History
A young man entered a shi’i mosque in sunni-majority Kuwait last week and set off a bomb that killed him…
Bridging Space and Time in a History Presentation Extravaganza
In early June, as Chicago’s non-existent spring of 2015 melted into the rainy first days of summer, ten PhD students…
AHA Member Spotlight: Carolyn Eisenberg
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
Reflections on the District of Columbia’s Emancipation Day Celebration at the Hill Center
At a recent Washington History Seminar, hosted by the National History Center and the Wilson Center, spoke about commemorating Emancipation Day…
The Planning Season
Each school year brings the promise of starting fresh, and for me, that promise begins in the summer. I think…
Judge Rules to Unseal Historic Grand Jury Records in Suit by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and AHA
On June 10, the chief judge of the Northern District of Illinois granted a petition to unseal the records of…
Field Notes from Angola: Of Archived Archives and Anarchic Archives
Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, sometime in the new millennium: After a few days of negotiating my way into a provincial…
Press Start to Begin
Academics tend to view video games as a medium for play, but as a historian, I see them as a…
Announcing the Summer Issue of Perspectives on History—Online!
Just last week, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a constitutional right for all Americans.…
Summer at the AHA: Preparations for the Committee Election and AHA Council Meeting
How do you know when it’s summer at the AHA headquarters? The telltale signs aren’t just the occasional staff brown…
Imperial Ends
Empires might have been created in fits of absentmindedness. But a mindful and dedicated research impulse is required for recovering…
My First Year on the Tenure Track
In anticipation of a new academic year, we solicited reflections from three early-career historians on their first years in new…
Back-to-School Discounts for AHA Members!
A new school year means new books to buy. With special offers from Oxford University Press and other top sources…
AHA Member Spotlight: Kate Geoghegan
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
What I Do: Valerie Paley, New-York Historical Society
As part of the Career Diversity for Historians initiative, the AHA is producing and making available short videos of historians…
My Two-Year Tour: Exploring What to Do with My MA as a Grad Student
While at the AHA, I’ve been hearing a lot of conversations on graduate education and careers that have resonated with my…
“Learning the Culture with My Own Eyes”
“As an English learner in America, I have strong passion in studying what I see. I like to learn the…
AHA Member Spotlight: Paige Glotzer
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
A European Merchant Ship with Indian Charm: A Mughal Miniature on Auction at Christie’s
A 16th-century Mughal miniature will likely be sold for 8,000–10,000 British pounds at Christie’s Islamic art auction on October 8.…
Connecting Young Historians
Where will my history degree take me? What will I do with it? What careers are available to a historian?…
My First Year beyond the Professoriate
In anticipation of a new academic year, we solicited reflections from three early-career historians on their first years in new…
AHA Member Spotlight: Ellen Carol DuBois
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our…
Potential Pitfalls
Over the past year I have started to participate in discussions about career diversity for humanities graduate students. Essentially, there…
Ecological Explorations on Staten Island: The Rise and Fall of “Sandy Ground Cultural Park”
I recently described a few wealthy enclaves adjacent to the Staten Island Greenbelt, subsidized by the city’s Special Natural Area…
2015 NEH Grant Award Winners Announced
On July 28, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced 212 humanities projects that will receive a total of…
Historians Named 2015 ACLS Public Fellows
The American Council of Learned Societies recently announced its 2015 Public Fellows, a program that places recent humanities doctorates in two-year,…
Under Construction
I never expected to find myself sitting at a desk, immersed in the day-to-day work of the National Highway Traffic…
Harper Lee and the Cold War Canon
Since the publication in early July of Go Set a Watchman (you can read the first chapter here), many of…
Connecting the Civil War to the Holocaust
In this post for our Summer for Historians series, Melissa Farah Young considers how her internship at Birmingham Holocaust Education Center inspired…